Somewhere Only We Know, Part II

Jim stole a glance at his building as he walked off into the night. Flames licked the tan brick walls, smoke billowed from windows, people screamed, the alarm screamed, sirens screamed, people stood and gawked, tenants ran out of his building.  But he just turned his back to it all, to his life, to his past, and walked in some direction down the dirty, brown street.

His loafer-clad feet stepped to the rhythm of some vague, deep-seated nostalgia his brain had conjured from its deepest catacombs.  Old skeletons, with vacant skulls, leered at him in his mind's eye as he walked down nameless streets.  Each skull reprimanded him for its own purposes, but he couldn't look them in the eyes.  He looked ahead instead, down the hall of some musty memory, looking for a door out.  The only light in those mental recesses were flickering torches on walls, burning cobwebs that turned and swung in some rancid, stale breeze from the depths ahead.

Jim, lost in his thoughts, was only vaguely aware of the changing neighborhoods around him.  Some were dirtier and browner than his own, some were nicer, a lighter shade of dull, some lavish.  He passed occasional parks, plenty of store-fronts, crossed an almost endless bridge, and continued until the city ended, the road started to wind, the trees got thicker at road-side, the night deepened, stars became visible, the moon rose, and he found himself, many hours later, far from his burning building and its hideous browns.

In his mind, the catacombs reached their darkest extent, when he found a heavy, stone door.  He pushed, he strained, he manipulated, levered, shoved, coerced it, and it grudgingly opened, inch by inch, and he ran into the blackness behind, which revealed open air, freedom, and escape.

Outside his mind, the eastern sky started to lighten, kind of a sickly, smoggish smear of pale blues, reds, oranges, yellows, greens, but color nonetheless.  As the sun exploded into the sky, it revealed a startling green wood around him and noticed consciously for the first time its fertile smell.  He sagged down in the shade of an elm, not far from the road, and lay down and let sleep take him into a dreamless state of peace.